15-Minute Reviews :: Zoner Photo Print v7.0.5000.15

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Zoner Photo Print version 7.0.5000.15 by ZONER Inc. – An application to aid in printing photos quickly and easily.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Zoner Photo Print helps you easily print photos and export photos to PDF albums. It is based on the printing wizard in Zoner Photo Studio 8 and can print photos in countless ways and present your photo collections in attractive photo albums. Zoner Photo Print provides several print job types to match the kinds of prints you want to do. There are plenty of options during each job type to help you tailor your print to your needs.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is relatively easy though not smooth
• Capability of templates, contact sheets, calendars or page saver
• Lots of templates – Even more available online
• Ability to export to PDF or save as a bitmap format as well as print
• Resulting prints were good quality

Quick Cons

• Have to have all images in a single folder
• No capability to change quantity of each image
• No way to adjust crop manually
• Would not change units to inches in calendar page layout
• Page saver did not fully optimize sheet tested and limited presets
• Application feels like an unfinished product

Expansion

This application is built in the form of a wizard-style format. After the intro page, there is a general layout to the stages with a few variances depending on which path you choose. The first step is choosing the directory in which to take your images from and selecting which images you would like to include in the print. The next step is where you choose from one of the four document types; Templates, Contact sheets, Calendars or Paper saver. The remainer of the steps are specific to each of the four document types. However there is some commonalities amongst them all, including paper size selection on all but Templates (which does not allow you to choose paper sizing); Theme chooser for all but Paper saver (Which instead has the ability to add different size spaces); as well as the image insertion system which gives you the ability to add photos automatically, automatically with rotation or manually and what type of automatic insertion will happen (Frame, Crop or Distort). While the automatic insertion options were a quick choice, it seemed to be more positive of an experience manually inserting the images, especially to maintain control of the look without having to redo a lot of images. The final step between all of the document types is the finalize page. On this page is where you made the decision on whether to print immediately, save to open in Zoner Photo Studio later (An add-on), save as bitmaps (With a lot of formatting options), as well as exporting to a PDF for archival, emailing or otherwise.

As mentioned above, there is a total of four different document types you can create; Templates, contact sheets, calendars and paper saver print sheets. The first three, templates, contact sheets and calendars are essentially all template-based options to allow you to build custom print packages for yourself, to add a bit of flair or index your photos quickly and easily. The templates are decent for most home users and wouldn’t be bad for those who struggle to make their images shine. I did find a link in the application to download more templates as well ( Link to templates ). There are a lot of framed templates and raw print templates included, which is a bonus. Installation was a bit awkward to browse to the folder, but went smooth from there.

To test, I did print a few test prints to see how things went and overall it worked out well. The PDF creation was well compatible with both Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat without any visual glitches. Overall, the resulting product is an acceptable quality.

There are a few bugs and downfalls with this application unfortunately. First off, the control over the photos themselves is awkward to non-existent in places. The lack of capability to run photos from multiple folders at the same time is not possible; If you want one print run, you will have to assemble the photos into one directory beforehand. There is no ability to change quantity of pictures to include, which you may find yourself stuck on with the paper saver feature especially; You may want to resort to Manual mode for image insertion just for this fact alone. The control over image insertion and such is very limited, with no control over cropping besides its automatic mode; And if you do choose automatic mode and your images do not appear in the order you desired, you may end up having to manually reinsert images anyways.

There was a problem a few times where the application would not accept changing to inches instead of millimeters; It happened a few times, but most notably was on the calendar page, where it would not change to inches at all the few times tried. This was difficult at best, because I was trying to change to 11×17 (Ledger) paper to see how the calendars would look in this format.

Another issue had was changing the paper size to 11×17 in the page saver function, and then adding 6 4×6 inch prints. I do these regularly and know I can add 6 to a page plus some room for a few smaller-size images too (Bulk cutting safe as well). Even with the margins set clearly small enough, the application would only add 5 images instead of 6, so there is an optimization concern with this application. As well, there is very few predefined common image sizes as well; No 8×10, wallet, sub-wallet, 4×5 or otherwise, leaving you to type in these sizes yourself.

Final Verdict

This application does make me wonder on the age of the product and the level of maintenance put into this tool. On the first page of the application does show Zoner Photo Studio 7; The current version of this application is Zoner Photo Studio 9 (According to Zoner’s website, 7 came out in 2005, 8 came out in 2006). Overall, while the application does result in decent output, its feeling of being an unfinished product makes this application a bit awkward to use. For free, this application may be a good one to try and see if it is what you like. As for paying $9.95 for this title, I would find it difficult to recommend for the points noted above.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, December 12, 2007